General overview

Like many artists I work in several different media, though the main two are video and painting. The subject areas I mainly explore are landscape and the interior in painting, and magic, illusion, the area of consciousness that is open to possibility, one might say the dream state, ritual and comedy in the videos.

My paintings are currently quite large and monochrome, using a drawing style and painted in acrylic. I also produce numerous drawings in ink or charcoal. The videos are usually under five minutes in length, though they can be up to one hour ("Mirror" 2006). They are not edited narrative sequences but rather portray single ideas, often incporporating a performance with make-up or masks. Some videos explore the possibilities of the digital medium and are quite abstract (Let's Trance 2007).

Philosophy

My artistic practice is based upon the confidence that whatever is imagined can, to some extent, be made. Central to my way of working is to constantly bring up challenges, be they technical or practical, and to use these challenges to keep my practice fresh and alive.

A brief history of my practice

I have a long history in painting and drawing encompassing several styles, working outdoors and in the studio using both oil and watercolour.

I began making videos in 2000. In my practice video is an extension of the painting canvas that allows movement in time. The movement from painting into video was also an attempt to explore narrative. Though the videos and the paintings often share the same subject matter, the videos have moved away from the predominance in the paintings of landscape subjects, towards the involvement of the human figure and performance. Following on from the development of my own performances as a means of creating the work I then began to examine pre-existing moving images as a source of material for making videos. (example "Marilyn's Chopsticks" work in progress 2006 -) Later experiments integrated media content found on the Internet, specifically spiritual and meditation broadcasts ("Let's Trance" 2007).

Key points in the development of my practice

With "Mirror" 2006 I focussed on the method of making the video as the main subject matter of the piece. The final video is like a documentary of the concept, method and process, as well as being the artwork. To make "Mirror" I took a ten-minute extract from one of my own improvised performances that had been captured on video and studied it movement by movement, learning the movements by heart until gradually I memorized the entire ten-minute sequence with enough accuracy that I could re-perform it twice and place the two takes side by side to make a 'pseudo mirror-image'. In order to try to make clear that the two halves were individual takes rather than the same one mirrored on computer I replaced some of the objects in the second take. The video took more than thirty takes to get two that could be synchronized, and the learning of the sequence took about three months. I made the decision to change it to black and white and slow it down to help with synchronizing and to emphasize the detail of the movements.

'Shizuko's Mirror' (work in progress featured in Testbed 5 at Leeds Met Gallery 2007) looked at a way of recreating a scene from a popular film by using physical objects to bring the work into the space of the audience. With this intention in mind I set out to see how I could create a realistic illusion of the reflection of a woman appearing in a formerly blank mirror. The idea was inspired by a scene from the film "Ring 2". I used one way mirrors and back-projected videos for the Testbed version.